It’s great having a knowledgeable person read over your work before you submit it. Quite a few people read over this article, and the reviewers still picked up things no one else had considered. The point, I think, is that maybe I should cast my net of readers a bit wider to begin with. Although I obviously don’t know who the reviewers are, so have no way of knowing what kind of background they have.

My writing isn’t bad. One of my Master’s examiners really ripped into my writing and my style (the other one actually praised my style, but you never take the good stuff away, do you?!?). Since then I have been really, really anxious about how I write. One of my reviewers commented that this article was ‘well written’, so that kind of lifts the stone a bit.

I know stuff, I think stuff, and I should say so. What I mean is that when you (read: ‘I’) are learning to construct new arguments, then you inevitably want to show the reader (or, very likely, the examiner) that you have thought about all the things and you have read all the things. You build an argument step-by-step and then at the end you meekly say ‘and so given all of this, I think that it’s probably kind of reasonable to assume that maybe xxx’. Sorry, self, that’s not convincing. So, state what you want to say and own it. This is the thing! Bam! And then you say, and here’s why, a, b, c.

In many ways I think this has been one of my big post-PhD learning curves. This may well be the first post-PhD piece of scholarship that I get out and it kind of sets the tone for how I will deal with other pieces of writing. At least in the immediate future. I’m sure each piece will bring an opportunity to develop something new. And, perhaps that’s what so exciting about this process.

For now, I have plenty to crack on with, so I am well and truly in the ‘fire off and forget’ stage of the process. For now the work is done, and we’ll see what happens.

In the last few months, I’ve received two rejections following peer review. Both were fairly positive, in that the reviewers were positive about the actual research, and made concrete and relevant suggestions for improvement.

The story of the first one is short. I have, for now, shelved the research. The article was based on my Master’s thesis. The reviewers were positive about the central idea, but the article needed restructuring. My research has moved on a lot, and honestly my heart isn’t in doing the extra work required right now.

The story of the second one is this: how I am dealing with those comments and the second-life of the article, from read-through to re-submission. I haven’t looked at the article since I submitted it in August, so I think there’s been enough time for me to come back fresh.

The PlanI’ve already briefly read the comments from the editor and reviewers, so I know broadly what they want to see changed. I’ll spend today ‘peer reviewing’ the article myself – trying to be objective, and critical. Then I’ll tally up my own revisions with those of the reviewers and decide which ones to tackle. At that point I’ll decide where to resubmit the article, and start on the revisions. And that will either be the end, or the start of another round of revising. Let’s see!

Tuesday, lunchtime.I’m just on half-way through the article. One of the comments I received was that my treatment of the poetry was, in some places, a bit superficial. Particularly in comparison to treatment of the historical and material evidence. I focus more on historical evidence in my research generally, so I wasn’t surprised to read that. With the benefit of some distance between me-the-writer and me-the-reader I can see exactly what the reviewer was referring to, and in some places I already know how to add a proper layer of analysis underneath it. Other places will require some more reading and thought. The good thing is that I already have some concrete suggestions to improve this article. I return to poetry at the end of the piece, so it will be interesting to see what the discussion is like there. I’m still feeling good about the work itself.

Tuesday, late afternoonI’ve finished my read-through, and I’m going to go through the reports in detail and make a list of revisions that need to be done and new research that needs to be added. One reviewer picked up on a pretty huge omission in the bibliography, something I thought I’d included, so I will need to double check that, and if it’s really not been cited I will need to cite it (and if it has, I will need to put it in the bibliography!). I’ll start rewriting on Thursday.

Thursday, afternoonI spent this morning working on my research proposal and am now coming back to the article. I’ve just read through the reviewers reports a few times and jotted down the things I agree will make the article stronger from my own read-though on Tuesday. I’m about to open a new document and crack on with re-writing the bits that don’t need significant change. There are two sections that I’ll do some more research on, and I’ll tackle those later. If I can get all the superficial stuff done today, then I should be in a good place to get this back out by the end of next week.

Friday afternoonAll the superficial stuff is done so I’m now doing a little extra reading and a bit of rewriting. I’m about to spend half an hour reading the poem I discuss at the beginning of the article again, and thinking about framing that discussion in a more nuanced way. One of the reviewers commented about that ‘the conclusion [of this section] seemed right… but the argument was not well developed’ so I’m going to try and plan out that small sub-section with the rest of the afternoon.

I’ll start part-two of the ‘Diary’ next week, and hopefully will have resubmitted the article by the time you hear from me again!

I’d love to hear about the way that others tackle reviewers’ suggestions and the article re-writing process, so feel free to get in touch!​(click here for part two)

Yesterday, the wonderful Dr Marple tweeted about monthly resolutions. One of the things I find difficult about year-long goals at the moment is the uncertainty of the future, so I am going to give monthly resolutions a go. Starting now. Although, I am going to stick with goal-related vocabulary.

So, goals for this month are simple:

Finish my application for Fellowship to the HEA. This is due to be submitted in March, but I want to have the actual application finished very soon, so as to get my references sorted out as well. (Look forward to some fun future posts about teaching and self-reflexivity!)

Work on the long version plan for the Next Big Project. This is the ‘master copy’ of the research programme that gets edited down for various applications and includes various things like an abstract, a year-by-year plan, differences between two and three year versions of the project, what the outputs will be, and of course what the actual project is about, and some representative examples, which keep being added to as I keep reading.

Work on job applications.

I am also going to work though some of my (various length) goals in a Goals Journal, which I will start today. I am the kind of person who likes to write things down, and this seems a bit naff even to me. But, I am going to give it a shot, and see if committing my goals to paper, and setting definite end-dates for various things will help or not. Does anyone else keep a goals journal? How do you organise it, or what tips do you have for others thinking of starting one?

In other news (and related to my previous blog post here) I am now blogging on the Post-PhD Life blog over at jobs.ac.uk. My author page is here, where you can find all the post I have written (currently one, but soon more).